Saturday ruling may be key

Thursday

May 29, 2008 at 6:00 AMMay 29, 2008 at 9:07 AM

By Joseph Williams and Scott Helman The Boston Globe

The epic battle between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack H. Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination shifted yesterday to the disputed delegates from Florida and Michigan, whose fate is rapidly becoming the flash point for Clinton supporters’ anger.

Hundreds of her backers, including a contingent from Massachusetts, plan to protest outside the Washington hotel hosting the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, whose ruling on Saturday could determine whether the nomination fight ends next week — or perhaps continues all the way to the party convention in late August.

“We want people to know why we’re there and that we are supporting the Clinton campaign and we feel she’s the better candidate,” said Christine Samuelson, a 57-year-old real estate agent and former Newton alderwoman who volunteered for Clinton in five states during the primaries. “And we want to make sure that she gets a fair shake.”

Clinton’s loyalists are encouraging the protests — and ratcheting up arguments for why Clinton deserves the lion’s share of the unseated delegates because she handily won the two states’ unsanctioned primaries. By contrast, Obama’s campaign told its supporters in an e-mail to stay away. Moving closer to clinching the nomination, Obama wants to avoid a spectacle that could harden the divide within the party.

“With a click of a mouse in the mid-Atlantic, we could get thousands of people there,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, told reporters yesterday. “But in the interest of party unity, we are not encouraging a protest. We don’t think a scene is helpful as we try to bring the party together.”

Though Plouffe said the fairest resolution “would be a 50-50 split” with Clinton, her campaign has flatly rejected that proposal, saying she should be awarded more delegates, in proportion to her victory margin in both states.

Steven Grossman, a top Clinton fund-raiser and Massachusetts supporter, said Obama would be wise to recognize Saturday will be a “singular moment” to mollify Clinton and her supporters.

“To the extent that Senator Obama and his campaign and his supporters demonstrate the kind of collegiality and collaboration on Saturday that shows both the kind of nominee he will be, should he be the nominee, and the kind of president he will be, should he win on Nov. 4, that will go a long way toward rebuilding relationships that are going to be essential over the next several months to beat John McCain,” said Grossman, a former national party chairman.

The Democratic National Committee voided the Florida and Michigan delegations to punish them for holding primaries in January, ahead of schedule. The candidates pledged not to campaign in the two states, and Obama pulled his name off the Michigan ballot.

But as she fell behind Obama, Clinton began arguing more emphatically that her wins should count, and she now needs the biggest possible gain from the two states to have any hope of catching Obama. Campaigning last week in Florida, she compared her fight to the struggles of blacks and women for the right to vote and warned Democrats were in danger of repeating the 2000 Florida presidential vote debacle.

The rules committee is scheduled Saturday to hear from both campaigns and come up with a settlement, but its ruling could be appealed to the credentials committee at the national convention.

In a memo sent to the rules committee late Tuesday, the party’s lawyers declared that at most the panel can restore only half of the two states’ 368 total delegates.

The DNC said yesterday, however, the lawyers were not recommending that solution, and their memo did not outline how to divide any delegates between Clinton and Obama.

Senior Clinton aides also disputed that the lawyers’ memo called for taking away at least half of the two states’ delegates.

If Clinton were awarded half the delegates she won in the two states, and if Obama received none from Michigan, she would cut his lead from about 200 delegates to 150, and Obama would be about 50 delegates farther away from the finish line.

Of the 30-member rules panel, 13 have endorsed Clinton, eight have endorsed Obama, and the rest — including the two cochairpersons — are undeclared. Clinton advisers could not say whether all of her backers would vote for full seating of the delegates.

“We are hopeful and expectant that people will do the right thing — and the right thing will be seating delegates at 100 percent of strength,” said Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director.

Clinton also wants the popular votes in Florida and Michigan to count to give her the overall lead — a key part of her closing argument to the dwindling number of undeclared superdelegates, the party and elected officials who in all likelihood will decide the nomination.

She sent them a letter and accompanying 11-page memo yesterday, insisting she, not Obama, would be the strongest Democrat to go up against McCain in November.

She contends she has won more primaries than Obama, leads McCain in the polls in the swing states a Democrat must win, and has the support of most core Democratic voters: women, seniors, Latinos, and working-class and rural voters.

“And most important,” she wrote to superdelegates, “I hope you will think about who is ready to stand on that stage with Senator McCain, fight for the deepest principles of our party, and lead our country forward into this new century.”

As the fiercely-contested, sometimes bitter contest between Clinton and Obama heads toward resolution, the strong undercurrent of anger among many Clinton supporters could hamstring Obama’s attempt to unify the party behind him if, as expected, he secures the nomination.

Her supporters, including older women — her central constituency and an important one for Obama to win over — resent the repeated calls over the last several weeks by prominent Democrats for Clinton to drop out.